Over 160 works comprise Darrel Ellis: Regeneration on the Bronx Museum, the primary institutional survey to honor the late artist. Drawings, work, and pictures spotlight the Bronx native’s experimental, semi-biographical observe and span a profession that sought to reframe Black identification in visible tradition and artwork historical past. Complementing Ellis’s works is an unlimited presentation of ephemera: magazines, catalogues, exhibition posters, household pictures, and journals recording the artist’s hopes, fears, and musings. As he grappled with anxieties associated to his household, sexuality, and concern of AIDS — to which he would succumb on the age of 33 — Ellis meticulously documented his life. It’s in these particulars that his voice is preserved.
Throughout his multidisciplinary observe, Ellis appreciated artwork historical past, paying homage to artists like Eugène Delacroix, Auguste Rodin, and Édouard Vuillard. He borrowed parts of key works by well-known artists, even recreating complete compositions at occasions. For an untitled work on paper circa 1990, he recreated {a photograph} of himself taken by shut good friend and fellow artist Allen Frame. Hanging on a wall behind Ellis within the paintings is a picture of a portray he made primarily based on Delacroix’s “Hamlet and Horatio in the Graveyard” (1839). Ellis’s personal model (c. 1980–90) is within the present alongside the work on paper. In his journals, he made notes and sketches primarily based on his frequent visits to native galleries and museums, specifically the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Pulled from an archive of over 50 notebooks, courting again to his highschool days, alternatives of the journals are exhibited in vitrines all through the present and reveal moments of vulnerability, aspiration, and nervousness.
While trying to the previous and the sphere of artwork historical past, dominated by White, male, European artists, Ellis additionally thought of his personal historical past and drew inspiration from one other artist: his father. Thomas Ellis was a photographer who died in a police encounter shortly earlier than the youthful Ellis was born. Darrel drew inspiration from his father’s pictures of household portraits, on a regular basis occasions, and festive gatherings. He projected the negatives onto irregular shapes and surfaces and rephotographed the outcomes, distorting and obscuring faces and our bodies, generally eradicating them completely so only a glimpse of the topic stays. “It is impossible presently to try to show a whole — a ‘normal’ reality, since it does not exist,” Ellis wrote in a diary entry from 1987.
By incorporating his father’s negatives, Ellis’s work brings to the fore the notable absence of Black people in a lot of Western artwork historical past. Ellis ruminated on Black household life and home area by portray, drawing, and photographing the identical topics, specifically portraits of his members of the family, over and over once more. “In general, there has been a conspicuous dearth of self-portraits by black artists,” reads one journal entry from 1990, wherein Ellis drafted a letter to artwork sellers.
The journals additionally reveal Ellis’s preoccupation with AIDS and mortality. “Do I have AIDS?” reads an entry from 1983. It’s unknown when the artist turned sick, however in 1984 his journals began to include notes on nutritional vitamins and various medication. He was hospitalized with AIDS-related sicknesses in 1991 and died in 1992.
Exhibited in the identical vitrine because the 1983 journal are reproductions of pictures that Peter Hujar and Robert Mapplethorpe took of Ellis. Hanging on the wall behind this show are ink and conte crayon works on paper recreating these pictures. Ellis made these in 1989 for Nan Goldin’s pivotal present reflecting on the AIDS disaster, Witnesses: Against Our Vanishing at Artists Space. Hujar and Mapplethorpe had each just lately died from AIDS problems.
These connective threads create an intimate, private lens to view Ellis’s observe. He spent his life and profession contemplating his identification as a Black, queer artist inside the context of Western artwork historical past and his family and creative neighborhood. Regeneration affords a poignant, heartbreaking story of the realities Ellis and his colleagues confronted, one marked by loss, nervousness, and self-determination.
Darrel Ellis: Regeneration continues on the Bronx Museum (1040 Grand Concourse, Concourse Village, The Bronx) by way of September 10. The exhibition was organized in collaboration with the Baltimore Museum of Art and curated by Antonio Sergio Bessa, Chief Curator Emeritus on the Bronx Museum, and Leslie Cozzi, curator of Prints, Drawings & Photography on the Baltimore Museum of Art.
